[ You wrote: ]
. . .
} Most, if not all, of the free sexy Internet stuff (digitized images,
} mostly, it seems) causing some frantic pre-election-year posturing in
} the U.S. Congress will probably no longer be free, or even cheap,
I'm absolutely convinced that commercial quality
information is coming, but I seriously doubt that it will
_replace_ that which is on the net today. Rather, we can
expect it to complement the many free offerings. After
all, nobody is paying for most of what is out there right
now yet many, many people continue to put up their
offerings and they do so for a variety of non-monetary
rewards. This is a fundamental part of the attraction of
the net and I expect it will continue to be so. On the
net, everyone's a publisher...
. . .
} Getting back to the thread, though, I'll have to vote for an HTTP
} header for rating information (to support "KidCode" or whatever)
The problem with this approach, as you point out, is that
it provides nothing more than hints and thus wont work in
all cases (after all, there are people that can't/wont rate
their offerings for whatever reason). Because censors will
still have to do other forms of client side filtering
anyways, and because these hints don't provide any benefit
to the rater, I don't see this proposal serving any real
purpose except to show people who are hot under the
collar right now that we're doing "something".
It might be nice to have the hint, but I don't see it as
becoming widely used. After all, what is my incentive to
me to provide these hints? I'm based in Canada, and unless
the U.S. plans an invasion some time soon (something we of
course can't rule out... ;-) I'm outside your jurisdiction
right now...
- peterd
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...there is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for
their existance will be in a great measure dependent on ours; they will
rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us...
- Samuel Butler, 1872
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